ends, the peculiar
convincing force of these brief representations. They take so little a
while to read, and yet in that little while the subject is so repeatedly
introduced in the same light and with the same expression, that, by
sheer force of repetition, that view is imposed upon the reader. The two
English masters of the style, Macaulay and Carlyle, largely exemplify
its dangers. Carlyle, indeed, had so much more depth and knowledge of
the heart, his portraits of mankind are felt and rendered with so much
more poetic comprehension, and he, like his favourite Ram Dass, had a
fire in his belly so much more hotly burning than the patent reading
lamp by which Macaulay studied, that it seems at first sight hardly fair
to bracket them together. But the "point of view" was imposed by Carlyle
on the men he judged of in his writings with an austerity not only cruel
but almost stupid. They are too often broken outright on the Procrustean
bed; they are probably always disfigured. The rhetorical artifice of
Macaulay is easily spied; it will take longer to appreciate the moral
bias of Carlyle. So with all writers who insist on forcing some
significance from all that comes before them; and the writer of short
studies is bound, by the necessity of the case, to write entirely in
that spirit. What he cannot vivify he should omit.

Had it been possible to rewrite some of these papers I hope I should
have had the courage to attempt it. But it is not possible. Short
studies are, or should be, things woven like a carpet, from which it is
impossible to detach a strand. What is perverted has its place there for
ever, as a part of the technical means by which what is right has been
presented. It is only possible to write another study, and then, with a
new "point of view," would follow new perversions and perhaps a fresh
caricature. Hence, it will be, at least, honest to offer a few grains of
salt to be taken with the text; and as some words of apology, addition,
correction, or amplification fall to be said on almost every study in
the volume, it will be most simple to run them over in their order. But
this must not be taken as a propitiatory offering to the gods of
shipwreck; I trust my cargo unreservedly to the chances of the sea; and
do not, by criticising myself, seek to disarm the wrath of other and
less partial critics.

HUGO'S ROMANCES. This is an instance of the "point of view." The five
romances studied with a different purpose